


An Artist and His Muse

by tinamachina



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:39:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2847974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinamachina/pseuds/tinamachina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the prompt from commentfic: Labyrinth, Jareth/Toby, Renaissance - an artist and his muse (you pick which is which)</p><p>Toby finds a strange painting in a museum; he learns of others that have had encounters with the Goblin King.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Artist and His Muse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EffingEden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EffingEden/gifts).



Toby sat on the bench in one of the Northern Renaissance rooms of the Met, sketching the image of a striking yet oddly familiar face.  He enjoyed the quiet, with just the occasional footfall of visitors and the soft scratch of his pencils on paper.  That quiet was about to be rudely broken.

“Blast it!”  That voice boomed through the cavernous hall, making Toby jump, “He got my eyebrows all wrong!”

Toby did not anticipate the Goblin King following him to the Above Ground, and sometimes it was Toby who had to remind him of proper protocol in the human world.  “Shush, dude!”  Toby whispered forcefully, pulling Jareth down onto the bench after getting an admonishing glare from one of the guards.  “It’s a museum, not your throne room.” 

“Sorry,” Jareth muttered, “I am not accustomed to silence.  One must be able to carry above the never-ending din of goblin chatter.” 

Toby looked sideways past Jareth.  It wasn’t just the sorceror’s voice that was getting looks from the guides.  Jareth’s attempts at “blending in with humans” did anything but; a black brocade jacket, black knee-high boots and black leather pants tight enough to “tell his religion”, as his mom might say.  Heck, Jareth looked like he jumped out of one of those paintings on the wall.  Speaking of which…

“Why does the man in that painting kinda look like you?”  Toby whispered, pointing to a 500-year-old triptych of a carnival of unearthly creatures.  Somewhere in that fantastic scene was a rakish young man leaning against a wall, in masquerade dress, wild blonde hair falling around his shoulders, mismatched eyes staring out to the painter in a come-hither gaze.

Jareth chuckled, “My dear boy, do you think you and your sister are the first to explore my realm?  No, there was no shortage of stray cubs in your world, a surplus of orphans left over from one of your many plagues, plenty of overburdened houses willing to part with a spare brat or two.  There was always a bargain to be made, but there was also the occasional ‘buyer’s remorse’.”  Jareth’s eyes looked far away, through the painting and almost through the wall and into another century, “One such human, maybe your age, claimed to be a painter, became enchanted with my kingdom, and quite take with me.  He begged me to let him paint me, called me his muse.  I am not immune to flattery, even if his skills with a brush were…questionable at best.” 

Toby had read the card accompanying the painting; the artist was a student of a master in some workshop in Flanders.  The curators thought that this was a scene out of Hell, modeled after “The Garden of Earthly Delights", but Toby knew better: it was the Pumpkin Harvest Festival in the Goblin City.  The painter made the goblins more grotesque than usual, the City more surrealistically more jumbled but Jareth was unmistakable, even if the artist toned down the eyebrows and the war-paint a little bit.  The artist was also taken with Jareth’s dangerous smile and his long legs and what lay between them.  Toby was tempted to ask if that fire-red codpiece was real or…

“What happened to him?”  Toby asked.  “How did this painting end up here?  Did he win?  Or did he stay?”

Jareth’s expression turned dark and irritated, as if an old wound had opened up.  “Why do you come back here?”  He shot at Toby, his glare ice-cold, “Is my labyrinth boring you?  Have I not given you everything that you desire, so much so that you feel the need to run back to this mundane little world?”

“No!” Toby whispered loudly, keeping his voice in check with the stillness of the room.  “You said I could come back and visit home when I wanted!  I was just doing a study like my teachers made us do in school!  I like to think I’m an artist, but I know I can be better.” Toby then proceeded cautiously with the temperamental king, “And…there aren’t a whole lotta museums in the Underground, so I come back up here once in a while to sketch, then I found this painting.  I could have just taken a picture but that just seems wrong.  I wanted to show you in my own way.  I want to be a better artist.  I wanna have my artwork all over the castle so you’d be proud to show it off.”

Jareth’s stern expression softened into a smile, “Of course you’re an artist, love.  And I’m sorry.  Culture is just not something that is appreciated where I’m from.”  He rolled his mismatched eyes.  “Crayon graffiti of my anatomy is about as high-brow as it gets among goblins.  I’d love some artwork.  I’d love your artwork.”  He hooked his chin onto Toby’s shoulder, looking down at the sketch, “And surely you could serve my beauty better than that hack on the wall.”

“I’ve got a good muse,” Toby turned his eyes to Jareth with a lopsided smile, “A vain, picky muse, but a good muse.”

“Oh really?”  Jareth bit Toby’s lip in retaliation.  If the guards had a problem with two men kissing in the middle of a museum, they did little to stop it.  This was New York, after all.

Toby broke the kiss, “Now, were there any other aspiring artists who felt the burning desire to…um…paint you?”

Jareth looked upwards in thought, “Have you been in the Post-Impressionists section yet?  It’s amazing what a little green fairy dust and absinthe will do to a human.”


End file.
